AG342

Direct purchase is now available: https://traceapp.info/buy

It wouldn't be too difficult, but I'd be hesitant to do it for fear of bloating what Trace was designed to do. Trace is built to do transcription and hand you clean markdown (which you can paste into whatever LLM you prefer for a summary). Many alternative solutions in this space are bolting on lots of "AI frills", which, in my experience, is what makes them start to feel heavy.

Please do drop me a line on [email protected] and let's chat!

Looks like echo cancellation is to blame here. I'm working on a more permanent fix but for now try turning off "Cancel system audio from the microphone" to see if that helps.

Thanks. Trace integrates with your Mac calendar, so if you’ve signed into your accounts with those it will pick them up. No support currently for direct Teams/Exchange integration but I’ll add it to the list.

Someone else has also reported this, which is not coincidental… Have you tried this with other applications too to see if it’s a teams-specific issue?

I’ll take a look as my top priority.

Thanks for the support. The videos are Vue components with CSS animations. As mentioned in a previous reply I’m happy to share the component if it’s of interest.

Yep, based in Sheffield, UK.

Recording and consent rules vary quite a bit by country and region, so it's on whoever is doing the recording to get the consent they need and to follow the law where they are. Still, I like the idea of putting a note on the FAQ to make that clear.

Appreciate it, thanks. They’re just Vue components with CSS animations. Drop me an email and I’ll send you the code.

[email protected]

Thanks for the feedback. Feel free to drop an email to [email protected] if you want a chat. Happy to hop on a call too if you'd prefer.

For the switching, do you mean if you hot-swap during a call? The mic should auto-switch if you've got System default selected, but feel free to give it a go and report back. If it doesn't do what we expect I can absolutely take a look at changing the behaviour.

Learning speakers is also on the to-do list.

P.S. Great choice in test audio. What a banger.

Trace has two engines that you can choose from. The fast one uses NVIDIA's Parakeet-TDT 0.6b v3 model run through FluidAudio, which surprised me with how fast it was. There is also an accurate engine, which uses Whisper large-v3-turbo via WhisperKit, which is slower but holds up better on accents and jargon.

Crash recovery is definitely something that I want to spend a bit more time on. I'm not entirely sure how Trace handles crashing right in the middle of a recording, so I'm going to put a bit of time aside in the next few days to properly explore this and see if I can come up with an elegant solution to it.

I think I've got the other two bits covered. I pushed an update yesterday that adds active echo cancellation so that audio playing through the speakers (or leaky headphones) won't get transcribed twice if it is picked up by the microphone. It can be disabled in preferences, but it's on by default.

The disk space issue is one that I considered as well. By default, Trace deletes the actual audio recordings as soon as transcription is successfully completed, so the idea is you keep just the markdown transcript rather than the gigabytes of raw audio. If you want, there's a preference to disable the auto-deletion. There's a bit more on the support page here https://traceapp.info/support (search for "Auto-deletion of audio").

FluidAudio is a big part of this and is actually used in two places during a session. It runs the Parakeet EOU model for the instant recap (which isn't hugely accurate, but it's good enough for the job) and after the call it's also used to transcribe the recording, depending on which engine you've selected (Trace offers a fast and an accurate one). If the fast engine is selected, we use FluidAudio with the Parakeet-TDT 0.6b v3 model for transcription, which then goes through Pyannote and WeSpeaker for diarization. If the accurate engine is selected, we use WhisperKit with the Whisper large-v3-turbo model for transcription, and SpeakerKit for diarization.

This is definitely on the to-do list if there’s enough demand for it. The payment/distribution/updates infra required is not insignificant, especially if nobody was that bothered, but by the sounds of it they are so I’ll bump this up the priority list.

It does indeed. Trace will record your system audio regardless of your speaker volume. You do have the option to mute your own mic temporarily though, via a button on the “pill” or a global keyboard shortcut.

I'm the developer of Trace, a non-intrusive, shortcut-driven Mac app that records and transcribes your meetings on-device. I know, another meeting transcription app. Please bear with me though, I'm confident that this is at least a little novel.

I primarily built Trace for myself. I'd been using MacWhisper, but there was enough fiddling before each call that I'd forget to start it and walk out of an hour-long meeting with nothing written down. So the things I cared about most were that it's quick to activate and stays out of the way. You activate Trace by pressing a global shortcut (configurable), which reveals a small bar at the bottom of your screen (there's also a keystroke and/or option to hide it entirely if you'd rather not see it at all).

As I was building it I wanted to bake in a couple of workflows I'd wished for in other transcription apps.

1. Mid-meeting you can press another global shortcut to mark a "key moment" and type a note. The note shows up in the resulting transcript inline at that timestamp. I wanted to add this because I kept catching myself thinking "wait, that bit matters" in meetings and reaching to jot it down in a separate app like Obsidian, which I then needed to add context to, which took me out of the meeting. I use it all the time. If I paste the transcript into an LLM afterwards (which I find myself doing more and more these days) the important moments are flagged so it doesn't gloss over them. This is more noticeable in longer meetings with lots of topics. 2. With another keyboard shortcut you can summon a rough live recap (subtitles, basically) to quickly recap what's just been said.

Trace uses standard macOS microphone and system recording APIs to capture both sides of the conversation as two separate tracks and then runs the system side through on-device diarization to identify speakers. Right now we only label them as "Speaker 1", "Speaker 2", etc but there are plans for speaker labelling in the future. You can also show a "live recap" as the call is happening to review what someone just said.

All transcription models run on your machine. To be clear though, Trace doesn't do any of the summarising itself, it just produces a markdown transcript, so if you want summaries then you need to pass the output to an AI.

The app is sandboxed and your audio/transcripts are never uploaded anywhere - they just exist as audio files and markdown on disk. The only network call Trace is required to make is on the first run to download the speech and speaker models (around 500MB) from Hugging Face, and after that it can be used fully offline. If enabled, a Google Calendar integration can auto-name sessions but that needs a network connection.

The app is £9.99 on the macOS App Store. I've been using it every day for months now and I'm super happy with how it's improved my workflow. Feedback very welcome.

This is an absolute blast. Thanks for sharing!

I've been working on a minimal, keyboard-driven Mac app that records and transcribes your meetings on device, similar to MacWhisper but way more minimal and simple. I originally built it for myself because I kept forgetting to start MacWhisper before calls. It uses Apple APIs to capture the mic and system audio, diarises it, and gives you a markdown transcript at the end. What I quite like about it is that during the call you can mark key moments, which then get inserted into the transcript at the right time. So if you do hand it to an LLM to summarise, it knows what was important.

https://traceapp.info

https://apps.apple.com/app/trace-on-device-transcripts/id676...

I've always wondered how they made the UX so slick - thanks for sharing.

I like the idea, but this does raise a larger question about sensitive information (that you've alluded to, but I think it's more of a systemic/cultural problem). Everyone knows you shouldn't be pasting env secrets and customer data into Claude, but many do it anyway because the perceived productivity gains offered by tools like Claude Code are just too high to ignore (and the payoff is instant and the potential risk is later).

What this does though is make that visible. If someone partakes in that bad practice, then the secrets are already sitting in the transcripts on their laptop - this just moves them somewhere shared and permanent. Maybe that's enough to discourage the practice, idk. Still, not strictly your problem, but an interesting one nonetheless.

I'm getting a 404 on the link. I've always struggled with how to track open "threads" with colleagues, so I hope this does what I think it does. Interested to see how it's implemented.